New paper: Arctic temperatures peaked before 1950, declining since

New paper using Oxygen 18 isotope tracking finds the Arctic temperatures peaked before 1950, and have been stable to declining since. Natural variability is cited as the cause.

A new paper published in Climate of the Past reconstructs temperatures over the past 1100 years from Eastern Arctic ice cores. The dating was done by Oxygen 18 isotope dating and the O18 data shows the highest Eastern Arctic temperatures of the 20th century occurred in the 1920’s-1940’s. The data shows that after that peak, there was a cooling or a warming ‘pause’ over the remainder of the 20th century.

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

Fig. 5a below shows a double peak in O18 proxy temperatures in the 1920’s and 1940’s followed by cooling to the ice age scare of the 1970’s, and temperatures in 2000 below those of the peaks in the 1920’s-1940’s. Five compilations of meteorological data of the Eastern Arctic in Fig 5b show good agreement to the proxy data.

This is the opposite pattern to what would be expected if man-made greenhouse gases were the cause, as even alarmists claim the increase in greenhouse gases has only had a significant effect since 1950. Instead, this new paper demonstrates Eastern Arctic temperatures peaked in the early 20th century, followed by a declining trend to the end of the record in 2000.

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Of course, just like the surface temperature record, the long term trend is up, but clearly there is also a pause since the double peak, and that’s hard to explain in the face of a linear increase of (some claim exponential) GHG emissions.

The paper:

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Proxy temperature reconstruction from the paper in graph A, followed by other meteorological data and compilations of the Eastern Arctic.

Understanding recent Arctic climate change requires detailed information on past changes, in particular on a regional scale. The extension of the depth–age relation of the Akademii Nauk (AN) ice core from Severnaya Zemlya (SZ) to the last 1100 yr provides new perspectives on past climate fluctuations in the Barents and Kara seas region. Here, we present the easternmost high-resolution ice-core climate proxy records (δ18O and sodium) from the Arctic. Multi-annual AN δ18O data as near-surface air-temperature proxies reveal major temperature changes over the last millennium, including the absolute minimum around 1800 and the unprecedented warming to a double-peak maximum in the early 20th century. The long-term cooling trend in δ18O is related to a decline in summer insolation but also to the growth of the AN ice cap as indicated by decreasing sodium concentrations. Neither a pronounced Medieval Climate Anomaly nor a Little Ice Age are detectable in the AN δ18O record. In contrast, there is evidence of several abrupt warming and cooling events, such as in the 15th and 16th centuries, partly accompanied by corresponding changes in sodium concentrations. These abrupt changes are assumed to be related to sea-ice cover variability in the Barents and Kara seas region, which might be caused by shifts in atmospheric circulation patterns. Our results indicate a significant impact of internal [natural] climate variability on Arctic climate change in the last millennium.

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[Note: this original post was written during my workday and making a comparison to the Cowtan and Way paper, and like sometimes happens during my day, I got interrupted, and then got off on a tangent that wasn’t correct. To correct my mistake, I’ve republished this post sans that tangent. Later I’ll get back to my original idea when I have more time. – Anthony]

This paper is devastating to the whole AGW issue. Instead of seeing a rise, we now have a 60+ year pause, at least in the Arctic which is supposed to be the canary in the AGW coal mine. The pause is easily twice as long as any increase that caused the kerfuffle in the first place. In simple terms, there is no there there. We have a planet ignoring the carbon based units that inhabit it.

Pretty much anywhere you look in the arctic, the land warming post-2000 is pretty remarkable.

REPLY: Still, I’d like to know what individual station records are active and which ones are not – and when. One thing I’ve noted studying Arctic stations is that they all tend to be isolated pockets of humanity, which require warmth. Warmth that of course becomes local waste heat. Do you have a mechanism to show what records make up your regionalized temperature potpourri and when they were made inactive? – Anthony

May be an outlier there but the data sure looks spotty in recent years. What is the “Expected Monthly Means” and “Regional Expectation”? How do you ‘expect’ a temperature or is this expecting a trend and that is the difference?

Zeke Hausfather, yeah, right, so probably the current warm period in the arctic is a little warmer than the one in the early 20th century. But that pesky early 20th century Arctic warming is nevertheless a huge problem for those that desperately want the Arctic to be the canary in the AGW mine. Like, for instance, Tamino, who got so p***ed that he black listed me permanently when I used that warm period to question his toying around with Bayes theorem here.

Warmists tend to like avoiding the fact that Arctic sea ice also ‘reacts’ with water temperature, wind / currents. You’d think it’s like Bali up there. :-)

Here are a few more examples from the 1920s to 1940s showing how the time travelling co2 villain had caused such man made havoc on our steady Arctic temps.

Abstract
The Early Twentieth-Century Warming in the Arctic—A Possible Mechanism

The huge warming of the Arctic that started in the early 1920s and lasted for almost two decades is one of the most spectacular climate events of the twentieth century. During the peak period 1930–40, the annually averaged temperature anomaly for the area 60°–90°N amounted to some 1.7°C…..
dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(2004)017%3C4045:TETWIT%3E2.0.CO;2

Abstract
The regime shift of the 1920s and 1930s in the North Atlantic

During the 1920s and 1930s, there was a dramatic warming of the northern North Atlantic Ocean. Warmer-than-normal sea temperatures, reduced sea ice conditions and enhanced Atlantic inflow in northern regions continued through to the 1950s and 1960s, with the timing of the decline to colder temperatures varying with location. Ecosystem changes associated with the warm period included a general northward movement of fish……
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2006.02.011

Monthly Weather Review October 10, 1922.
“The Arctic seems to be warming up. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explores who sail the seas about Spitsbergen and the eastern Arctic, all point to a radical change in climatic conditions, and hitherto unheard-of high temperatures in that part of the earth’s surface….

In August, 1922, the Norwegian Department of Commerce sent an expedition to Spitsbergen and Bear Island under Dr. Adolf Hoel, lecturer on geology at the University of Christiania. The oceanographic observations (reported that) Ice conditions were exceptional. In fact, so little ice has never before been noted. The expedition all but established a record, sailing as far north as 81o 29′ in ice-free water. This is the farthest north ever reached with modern oceanographic apparatus…..”
docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/050/mwr-050-11-0589a.pdf

Examiner (Launceston, Tas. – 25 April 1939
…It has been noted that year by year, for the past two decades, the fringe of the Polar icepack has been creeping northward in the Barents Sea. As compared with the year 1900, the total ice surface of this body of water has decreased by twenty per cent. Various expeditions have discovered that warmth-loving species of fish have migrated in great shoals to waters farther north than they had ever been seen before….http://tinyurl.com/aak64qf

“Of course, just like the surface temperature record, the long term trend is up, but clearly there is also a pause since the double peak, and that’s hard to explain in the face of a linear increase of (some claim exponential) GHG emissions.”

The authors say that a lot of this was local:“In the AN δ18O record, the ETCW exhibits a double-peak shape with two distinct maxima 10 around 1921/1922 and 1937/1938 (Fig. 4), indicating two major warming pulses. This specific ETCW pattern and particularly the strong warming around 1920 are to our knowledge only detected in very few regional SAT time series (i.e. Svalbard, Vardø and Archangelsk; Fig. 4) and represent, thus, a peculiarity of the Barents and Kara seas region. AN ice core maximum δ18O values during the ETCW were not reached again in the 20th century and, moreover, represent the highest of the entire AN ice core record.

The core was drilled 1999-2001, so there’s not much coverage of recent warming.

Using the term “Medieval Climate Anomaly” is an attempt by the warmist crowd to belittle the impact of sever hundred years when the climate was warmer than it is today. Using the term “anomaly” implies a brief, transient event — something not really worth mentioning.

“Of course, just like the surface temperature record, the long term trend is up, but clearly there is also a pause since the double peak, and that’s hard to explain in the face of a linear increase of (some claim exponential) GHG emissions.”

But what about Greenland? It really is worse than we thought.. Can it get any worse than this? We must act now!!!!

Abstract
….The record indicates that warmer temperatures were the norm in the earlier part of the past 4000 years, including century-long intervals nearly 1°C warmer than the present decade (2001–2010). Therefore, we conclude that the current decadal mean temperature in Greenland has not exceeded the envelope of natural variability over the past 4000 years, a period that seems to include part of the Holocene…..
[Takuro Kobashi et. al.]
——-Abstract
An aerial view of 80 years of climate-related glacier fluctuations in southeast Greenland
…………the recent retreat was matched in its vigour during a period of warming in the 1930s with comparable increases in air temperature. We show that many land-terminating glaciers underwent a more rapid retreat in the 1930s than in the 2000s,……
[Anders A. Bjørk et. al. – 20 April 2012]
——-Abstract
Greenland warming of 1920–1930 and 1995–2005
“…the rate of warming in 1920–1930 was about 50% higher than that in 1995–2005….”
[Petr Chylek et. al. – 20 June 2006]
——-Abstract
Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Air Temperature Variability: 1840–2007
“…The annual whole ice sheet 1919–32 warming trend is 33% greater in magnitude than the 1994–2007 warming….”
[Jason E. Box et. al. – 2009]
——-Abstract
Extending Greenland temperature records into the late eighteenth century
“…The warmest year in the extended Greenland temperature record is 1941, while the 1930s and 1940s are the warmest decades….”
[B. M. Vinther et. al. – 6 June 2006 [pdf]]
——-Abstract
The State of the West Greenland Current up to 1944
“….It is found that warmer conditions existed during the decade of 1880, followed by a colder period up to about 1920, when the present warm period began. The peak of the present warm period appears to have been reached in the middle 1930’s,…..”
[M. J. Dunbar – 1946]
——-Abstract
A period of warm winters in Western Greenland and the temperature see-saw between Western Greenland and Central Europe
Particulars are given regarding the big rise of winter temperatures in Greenland and its more oceanic climate during the last fifteen years….Dr. F. Loewe – 1937

I once asked Dana from the Guardian whether we would still be in the Little Ice Age if it was not for man – he basically said YES?!!!!

Think about it: The River Thames freezing over multiple times, death and famine, failed harvest, huge storms etc. Yet we have never had it so good. Why is it that co2 is always a heathen gas? Why do most plants hate the stuff? Why does it cause toxic greening in our biosphere? Why is the climate so normal? Can someone help me please?

This warming certainly agrees with the recollections of a retired Russian Arctic ice pilot I interviewed aboard an icebreaker some time ago. They hopefully thought it would continue, but then the cold set in again. Just one of many reasons for “skepticism”.

The double peak in temperature history (far more than arctic alone) is also seen in other data including instrumental readings when such haven’t been heavily rewritten/”adjusted,” as in http://img176.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=81829_expanded_overview_122_424lo.jpg . If done right and honestly, proxy reconstructions are one way to get past rewriting of data, like a tree ring one extending up through the entire 20th century (instead of cutting off part-way) likewise matched the actual double-peak history.

What should be top priority is the investigation into what is causing such amplified warming in the Arctic. Answering that question should be able provide some help in separating recent natural warming from man made warming.

Geothermal heat? Ocean currents? I mentioned black carbon/soot in a previous post as a possibility for recent warming but that was not a factor before 1950.
Changes in the earth’s magnetic poles/fields?

It is crystal clear that strong regional warming has been happening(with pauses) dating back well before CO2 was high enough to be a factor. This effect, focused uniquely, regionally and with changes/pauses? that are timed/caused by an unknown force(s), should allow us to eventually pinpoint the source/cause.

Really why do we care what the artic does? It is mostly sea ice which will have little effect on sea levels regardless of the state it is in. With less ice, navigation will become easier and less risky.
It really is not important enough to waste any time or resources on.

I’ve been to a few rodeos now and I think the dO18 isotope proxy is the only reliable temperature proxy there is.

Forget the tree rings, the coral rings, some other chemistry-based proxies – dO18 is reasonably accurate on very short timelines, medium-term timelines and way, way back into the deep, deep history of Earth’s climate. Having said that, it is also need to be converted to temperature using the proper local-based formula. Too often, the formula for mid-latitude oceans or the global average is used by “climate scientists” to distort the history but there are definitive local situation formula.

And I say, forget Berkeley Earth. Their method is flawed and you can compare BEST’s data to some station you know is accurate and BEST is way off in terms of the overall trends over time. They might get the short-term up and downs right, but then there is a breakpoint that changes the negative trend or some oscillation into a large rising trend. Theory versus reality and I think there is upward trend bias built-in.

The Arctic does appear to be warmer in the 1920s and 1940s. There were few stations back then (and the NCDC and GISS have distorted the data in the current databases) so it is not as recognized as it should be. It cooled off from 1950 to the late 1970s as well.

Did the Inuit invent kayaks and whaling boats and travel up and down the Northwest Passage and make it to Greenland or not. Obviously they did. The conditions could not have been much colder than today if you go back 1,000 years for example or there would be no such thing as a kayak. Prima Facie.

And yet the assumption is that there are minimal “local effects” and that its valid to smear the recent warming completely over the Arctic region. At the end of the day if we have no measurements then we have no measurements. We can do stuff like hybrid kridging to have a guess…but its a guess. Its not scientific evidence. Just like models are a guess and not scientific evidence.

When did we move away from actual science? When did we move away from proper reproducible facts representing science and hypotheses being posibilities… to hypotheses being “facts” ?

It used to be that hypotheses were the starting points. Now they’re becoming the endpoints.

There several other studies to support the conclusion Arctic temperatures have not risen since the 50s.

The greatest loss of Arctic sea ice has been due to warm water intrusions in the Barents and Kara (Figure 1 http://landscapesandcycles.net/antarctic-sea-ice–climate-change-indicator.html)
The behavior of the glaciers on islands in that region provide further support to this paper’s conclusion of no warming since the 50s. Researchers wrote, “Recession of tidewater calving glaciers on north Novaya Zemlya in the first half of the twentieth century was relatively rapid (.300 m yr-1), consistent with post-‘Little Ice Age’ warming documented by a 122-year instrumental record from Malye Karmakuly. The glaciers completed 75 to 100% of the net twentieth-century retreat by 1952. Between1964 and 1993 half of the studied glaciers were stable; the remainder retreated modest distances of ,2.5 km.” read 796. Zeeberg, J. and Forman, S. (2001) Changes in glacier extent on north Novaya Zemlya in the twentieth century. The Holocene, vol 11, p. 161–175.

Tree ring and instrumental data from northern Scandinavia are also in agreement with the warmest peaks in 40s.

Much of any warming is due to ventilation of heat from ice free waters. HOwever over ice covered western Arctic Ocean and based 27000 dropsondes and drifting Russian ice stations researchers reported “In particular, we do not observe the large surface warming trends predicted by models; indeed, we detect significant surface cooling trends over the western Arctic Ocean during winter and autumn. actually showed a cooling trend in the 80s and 90s” Kahl, J., et al., (1993) Absence of evidence for greenhouse warming over the Arctic Ocean in the past 40 years. Nature 361, 335 – 337.

Maybe the present Arctic conditions are not quite so “unprecedented” after all? Looks like they may need a virtual Thor’s hammer to flatten out (adjust) that pesky 1920s-1940s warm period from the proxy record.

According to Dr Otto Pettersson quoted by Rachel Carson in the very last part of her book…The living sea…..’in 1919 the coal shipping season from the west spitzbergen ports increased from 3 to 7 months’….a fairly dramatic change

Since Rachel Carson’s book is full of junk science
and since 1919 coincides with the end of WWI (which may have: 1) made shipping lanes safer; 2) freed up ships for freight) here is a more reliable source for the same info. (nicely cited by Gopal Panicker at 8:02pm today):

Svalbard {Norway} is often referred to as an example of a significant 20th century temperature rise (almost 4oC). In this context, however, it should be noted that this temperature increase almost entirely took place within the period 1915-1922, as is shown in the diagram below. This temperature rise was concurrently experienced at most other North Atlantic measurement sites and was presumably caused by North Atlantic oceanographic changes.

Not that your post wasn’t likely correct, Gopal Panicker (is that your real name, btw? — I haven’t encountered it before; just wondering — lol, whenever I see your name, I always think “Global Panic-er” and think for half a second you’re a hysterical pro-AGW person), just that Rachel Carson was SUCH a moron that I wanted to back up your good assertion with a more reliable source. My quick search using Bing did not find that Dr. Pettersson quote anywhere else or I would have cited that source (if it had been a reliable source), here.

I expect my following comment to be cut, but I am sick of the way the alarmists seem to be able to allow themselves to use whatever dodgy fraudulent adjustment, cherry picking of dates and data torturing technique that they see fit to support their repeatedly falsified hypothesis, and yet, unjustifiably still be taken somewhat seriously as scientists.

In short and to be very crude, If I measured my penis the way climate alarmists measure global temperatures, I could claim to have a 15 inch long monster between my legs.

And it looks like my original post on this article has disappeared, wish I could remember what I said – lol.

Memory aid: install Lazarus add-on, and set the retention periods to a nice long stretch (I use 100s of weeks for temp files). You will never lose or ‘forget’ a post again. Saves every entry in real time as you type.

Ken Hall says (November 20, 2013 at 2:58 am): “In short and to be very crude, If I measured my penis the way climate alarmists measure global temperatures, I could claim to have a 15 inch long monster between my legs.”

Big deal. If “climate alarmists” measured Angelina Jolie, they’d get the same result.

Your guru looks like the Unabomber. He thinks like him, too. He’s a notorious alarmist.

What you should probably do is get out a paper or maybe open paint, and sketch the properties of the reflective insulation that deflected a fifth energy away from sensors on a planet,
and making the temp rise.

When you’re done with that sketch out for yourself how, with that 20% E in missing,
the icy frigid fluid gas bath the globe’s immersed in, made temps on e.v.e.r.y. s.i.n.g.l.e.
heat s.e.n.s.o.r.
on the p.l.a.n.e.t.
Rise yet again.

You’re in here telling me you know the difference between warmer or not, and I’m telling you, the atmosphere’s a cold, thermally conductive bath that can’t heat the earth no matter what it does.
Cold thermally conductive baths, can’t raise temps on something more than if it were in vacuum.

You say the atmosphere’s a giant heater,
I remind you, that you can’t even explain premise one: prove the atmosphere’s not actually a reflective coolant bath.

You’ll flunk that.
You’ll flunk the second one: show us all some example of a cold gas bath making temperatures rise above the temps without the cold gas bath, in vacuum.

You’ll flunk that too, and we haven’t cracked a book yet.

Add that onto the fact the gas you claim is responsible for ‘heating’
CO2- with water –
is actually the one responsible for reflecting away that 20% E in that you claim
magically
made every heat sensor on the planet show
more energy arriving,
than when 20% more energy
was arriving.

P.S. You need to remind your Unabomber looking guru he can go ahead and update his ice charts. He never saw it coming because he’s just a magic gas scammer but there’s a lot of ice up there.
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if you have two bodies of different equilibirum heat, but each partly regulated by the other, warming the cooler body will cause the warmer body to warm, all else being equal. Different layers of the biosphere have widely different temperatures, despite being thermally connected. Change the equilibrium temperature in one layer and the whole system has to adjust – unless there is a perfect thermal insulator between layers.

@ barry, your statement is only correct if at least the warmer body has some form of external energy source attatched (or both bodies do), a mere heat bath won’t do. If the warmer body actually warms and the temperature rises that rise in the temperature came from the energy from the external source, not from the cooler body. The now warmer cooler body merely caused the warmer body to not lose as much energy to itself, conductively or radiatively, or even convectively. Without external energy flowing in to the warmer body, a cooler body can never cause the temperature of a warmer body to rise so you cannot say the cooler body warmed the warmer body, at best it made the warmer body cool more slowly.

Now on your side, I do see buried in a few words that you are saying the warmer body does have an external energy source, you said 1) both are at equilibrium 2) one is cooler than the other. By that definition there is heat flowing from the warmer to the cooler and the warmer is being replenished with the lost energy from somewhere else, an external energy source.

Too many say things of this subject without being perfectly clear. Steven R Vada seems to be speaking of an un-powered system, leaving out the solar constant input, and you are speaking of a powered system without spelling that out very clearly that it may take someone versed in thermodynamics to pick that underneath the words.

@ Steven R Vada, listen to barry and consider what he is saying, due to the solar energy input the atmosphere can alter the surface’s temperature, either way, up or down, for it affects how much can escape through it. Fortunately that amount allowed to leave, in co2’s case, is tied to the infrared optical thickness and that is not changing as co2 concentration has raised since the 50s so any warming we have is from somewhere else, albedo (clouds) or solar variances in some manner, possibly even emissivity of the surface (land use), bad temperature records, all of the above.

It is more correct to say it your way – that the wamer body loses less heat, but I think that is less easy to grasp for average punters with no physics background. Just say that there is a (relatively) fixed stratification to temperature layers, and that changing the temperature of one means the others must adjust – unless there is a perfect thermal insulator between them.

A good intuitive analogy is car engine overheating. No matter the temperature of the day, a car’s engine always runs hotter than the ambient air. But most people who’ve been around a few decades know that cars tend to overheat on hot days more than cold – so the temperature of the relatively colder air affects the temperature of the much hotter engine.

We’re not really in disagreement about the physics, just say it differently.

But I think we disagree on this, although it’s hard to gauge from your syntax:

Fortunately that amount allowed to leave, in co2′s case, is tied to the infrared optical thickness and that is not changing as co2 concentration has raised since the 50s

CO2 has risen significantly since the 1950s (and by 40% since the industrial revolution). Observational evidence of decreased brightness of IR in the CO2 spectral bands leaving the Earth’s atmosphere from stallites demonstrates that more CO2 in the atmosphere = more absorption of upwelling IR. It’s also observed from land-based sensing. Those ‘predictions’, at least, came out right.